


Simply By Being There

by blogotron9000



Category: Captain America (Movies), Endgame - Fandom, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, F/M, Gen, Hydra (Marvel), Madripoor (Marvel), Marriage Proposal, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), SHIELD, Timey-Wimey, like steve could ever just retire lolol, where's bucky
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-15 16:47:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18673603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blogotron9000/pseuds/blogotron9000
Summary: When Steve Rogers went to the past, a new timeline branched off. The safe thing to do would be to sit down and live a quiet life, so that things happen as they did the first time around.Steve Rogers has never been one to play it safe. And Steve Rogers has never been down without finding a way to get back up again.Living is one thing. Living quietly is another altogether. Here are seventy years of the life he wasn't supposed to get, in vignettes. (Many more MCU characters to appear in time.)





	1. Chapter 1

PART 1: SHIELD

"I'm not supposed to be here," he tells her, when the dance is done.

The music has long since ended, needle scratching empty air. They linger together, still swaying. Their twinned heartbeats provide all the rhythm they need, their breath the melody.

She doesn't move for a moment. Then her head lifts off his chest, her hand finds his cheek. Her sad smile opens a hundred new wounds in his heart and heals a thousand more. "Tell me."

They sit on the couch, overstuffed pillows tumbled to the floor. Her fingers are cool and still in his as he tries to explain: the branching possibilities of worlds, this stolen time. All the technical jargon still rolls awkward off his tongue, a foreign language he never quite learned to speak. But by the time he's wrapping up, she nods her head slowly. "I could still go back," he offers. "Maybe this is the way it always happened, in the stream I came from. We can both move on, now." One borrowed moment is more than many get.

He tries not to think of the man, sleeping so long already and so long left to go, from whom he's borrowed this one.

Her grip tightens, as if he might pull away. "You can't know that's the case. Perhaps this _is_ your old time-stream, but it seems to me from what you say, you've opened up a new path entirely simply by being here."

"If I stay …" He closes his eyes. No--there's too much to see in the darkness there. Warm fingers, strange and familiar, slide up his arm to his elbow, his shoulder. He opens his eyes and lets her face fill his vision again. He can't get drunk anymore, but this? This is damn close. "It would have to be a quiet life. Keeping hidden. Trying not to change things that I already know happened the first time around."

"Trying _not_ to!" Her face colors and her nails dig in through the cotton of his shirt. It's good to see her angry--it makes this, makes her, more real. This is the woman worth traveling through time for. "Steven Rogers. Do you mean to tell me you came here, armed with decades of foreknowledge, with a chance to do things better this time around. And you plan to sit here and--what? Be my house husband?"

He came armed with objections, reasons to do exactly that. Every single one slides out of his head when she gives her head a single disappointed shake. His mouth works; it takes him a moment to realize he's smiling. "I could try."

"You could do rather more than that, I think." Her hand goes behind his neck to pull him closer but he's already moving, wrapping his arms around her, burying his face in her hair and breathing her perfume. Her face is wet, or maybe that's his. She says, against his ear: "You were _always_ supposed to be here."


	2. Chapter 2

First things first.

It's only 1950 and already the rot runs deep in the fledgling foundations of SHIELD. When the corruption crumbles, the rest goes will go with it. Later, Steve will wonder--would he have done it all over again, knowing that? Is this how all his do-overs will go? Second-guessing himself, third-guessing, it's guesswork and self-recrimination all the way down.

Zola denies everything, of course, at the outset. He plays the rumpled, guileless lab jockey in front of three Congressional committees. In front of Steve and Peggy, of course, he's got nothing but cold smiles and silence.

"Where's Bucky?" Steve asks him. Never before in his life has he been tempted to pour enough hurt into someone else that information comes bubbling out of them. He doesn't, of course. But the desire to rises like acid in his throat, and burns.

During their whole first post-time-travel meeting, Howard Stark manfully pretends he isn't crying, has in fact never cried, possibly doesn't even in fact know what tears _are_. Steve clasps his hand and tries not to see Tony in every line of the elder Stark's face. Steve has no interest and even less ability in pretending away the sorrow. What if by being here, by changing things, he rewrites Tony out of this timeline altogether? He has to account for that possibility. He has to plan accordingly. And he has to make it worth it, if that should come to pass.

In time, it'll hurt less to see Howard standing beside him, where Tony should have been. Steve's got nothing but time now.

Zola's had two years to sink roots into the tender new soil of SHIELD and Howard doesn't hesitate before throwing himself facefirst into the problem. He doesn't know exactly what's looking for, but he recognizes it when he turns it up from data banks and digitizations. Corrupted code, hidden kill switches, illicit messages spiderwebbing across the hidden face of the world. Tying together the many farflung heads of Hydra.

Within a month, the US and its allies have pulled out of Korea, where they've been fighting a war and calling it anything else but. Sometimes, when reporters catch Steve and stick a microphone in his face, he lets folks know what he thinks about _that_. Troops are deployed around the world: Argentina, Yugoslavia, Sokovia, Syria. The USSR doesn't want help from its one-time Allies in pursuing this threat on sovereign territory, but word of detonated lairs and executed traitors filter out from behind the Iron Curtain. Captain America himself leads a squad to scrape the last Hydra scrum out from _within_ America's own not-so-sanctified borders.

Dozens of dead drops, cleaned out. Scores of infiltrators turned out, interrogated, sentenced.

No one finds a frozen soldier with a metal arm.

"Where's Bucky?" Steve asks.

Zola smiles. "Hydra has many heads," he says, musically. It's too early in this timestream for him to have remade SHIELD computers into his own warped image: the technology is too primitive, the whisper of his own mortality too quiet. But he has beaten Steve on this one front, and it's enough to push a petulant smile onto his face. "Cut off one, and--well, you know the rest."

Steve breaks the skin of his knuckles on the table; breaks the table too. Peggy's there, saying something quiet in his ear, guiding him out of the room until he can see again in shades of color and not just black and white and red. "Where's Bucky?" he asks the mirror in their bathroom later that night. His own haggard reflection doesn't offer any more answers than Zola did.


	3. Chapter 3

SHIELD itself is the first casualty of this warped new timeline.

Public approval falls off a cliff as the news come out: Congress's expensive new pet project, fresh off the line and already rife with damage. People still remember war rations; people lay fresh flowers on graves once a month. When they hear that SHIELD and the Strategic Scientific Reserve not only failed to destroy Hydra during World War II but actively incorporated them, handed them the keys to the very kingdom--well. Having Captain America himself, back from the dead, to testify before Congress buys them a little goodwill. A _little_. But it's not long before funding evaporates faster than spilled soda on a sidewalk in July.

Howard's got money, of course, and he's willing to sink it into whatever pet project Steve proposes. "Not this," Steve tells him. Howard's one man and there's an awful lot of future left to fix. Steve has a plan and it's the kind that can be tackled by one relentless man. There are problems that can be drowned in massive amounts of money. Those will keep for later. "Not yet."

The Pentagon officially shutters SHIELD at the end of the fiscal year. Steve stands beside Peggy while soldiers pack all her years of work into numbered cardboard boxes and haul them out the door. Her face is pale behind a slash of scarlet lipstick.

"Ma'am," says the young man who is supposed to usher them out, at the end. "S-sir."

"You don't need to tell us twice, soldier." Peggy affixes her hat to her head and marches out into the hallway. Out the door. Into whatever new life waits on the other side. She wears high heels and Steve still has to double-step to catch up with her.

Outside, sunlight filters weakly through the clouds. Peggy waits just on the other side of the doors, arms folded tightly, head down. "Sorry, Peg," he says, to the back of her head, just as she stiffly says, "I am so _sorry_."

Her shoulders loosen. She turns to look at him, face cast in shadow beneath the hat's wide brim. "Sorry!" she echoes, as if an apology didn't just fall out of her own mouth. "Whatever for!"

He jerks a thumb at the building behind them, where two kids in uniform are stretching iron chains between the handles of the front door. "You helped build this from the ground up. It's dead because of what I did." What was that time travel story--the one that hasn't been written yet, the one about the guy who steps on a butterfly and screws up the future? Maybe it never will be written now. There's a SHIELD-shaped hole in Steve's vision of the future.

"It's _dead_ because of Hydra." Her finger jabs him in the chest hard enough to make him wince. "It's had poison running through its veins from the very first. I'd rather it die now than let it live on, corrupted." Her hand softens, flattens against his shoulder. "But it did afford us resources that are now quite outside our reach."

"We're going to find him."

"I know." She essays a smile that curls her lips but leaves her eyes glassy, distant. "But I would have liked to make it easier, if I could have."

"I have a lead, Peggy."

A moment of unguarded surprise blossoms pink in her cheeks--a surprise which quickly sharpens to an edge of irritation. She gives him a shake by his shirt-front. "And when were you going to tell me?"

"Now." Reluctantly he smiles. The past few months' dance have been a rough stutter-step more than an easy waltz, but the glow of optimism in her face warms him too. "Remember the briefing a couple weeks back--Jones and Falsworth had dug out a Hydra nest in the Balkans?  They heard a rumor, passed it on via less-than-official channels when they got a chance." He spares a moment to mourn those lost few weeks of inaction. Cell phones had been a nuisance now and again, but waiting for messages to wing their way by paper and wire had gotten to be excruciating. "Romania, they say. I'd like to check it out."

"Mm." Her eyes glitter. "Well. We haven't had a proper honeymoon, and Bucharest would be nice, this time of year."

"A proper--!" His hand catches hers, where it still rests against his chest. The pulse in her wrist hammers against his palm. "Agent Carter. I think you're supposed to get down on one knee when you ask a guy to marry you."

"And risk snagging my stockings?" she demurs. "I should think not."

He answers her without a word. Hope is a habit, after all, and if he's fallen out of use with that, he's got plenty of time to set things to rights.


	4. Chapter 4

A sharp ozone smell cuts through the other, fouler odors in the room: sweat, mildew, stale urine. Bare wires web the walls and wrist-thick cords limply across the floor. Some terminate in branches or plug into sockets; others just _end_ in a snarl of metallic threads. The recent fighting here and on the level above has only destabilized the already dubious electrical work. Steve stands carefully between dangling cords and around cracked concrete. Torn pages from laboratory notebooks stick to the damp soles of his boots. He has to bend his neck to keep from striking his head on the low ceiling, especially where it now slopes at an arcane and probably not altogether stable angle. He wipes blood from his mouth.

This place was probably built as a storage cellar, maybe even a bunker. There's nothing left aboveground now but fallow fields and a few angry, squalling ravens. Impossible to say from the bones of the foundations what had once stood here. A farmhouse? A country school? When someone carved it out of the ground, they'd never meant it to be a Hydra facility.

Intent doesn't count for much, as it turns out.

Dum Dum Dugan scuffs on the stairs behind him. "We're all clear, Cap. Carter, Morita, and Jones have got the only exit locked down. If there's any Hydra blow-offs left in this rabbit den, they're not getting far." His footsteps stop, and leather gloves creak as his grip on his rifle loosens. "Well, I'll be damned. It's really him."

Bucky Barnes lies facedown on the floor, huddled amid broken glass and splintered metal. Bruised but unbroken. Steve is so _tired_ of having to hurt this man. (Getting hurt _by_ him is also, he has to note, less than desirable.) They'd given him an arm already, but a simpler design, and not one composed of vibranium--conventional metal that he'd pulped against Steve's shield.

The programming's already in there too, and not the sophisticated blank slate that Steve saw, in D.C. and Bucharest, in another lifetime. Whatever's in Bucky's head now is primitive, it's vicious, and it does _not_ like Captain America. Absently, he pulls a shard of glass from his own side and casts it away. It shatters to powder in a dark corner. "You've already seen one person come back from the dead, Dugan." He bends, slides his arms under Bucky's knees and shoulders. " _Two_ isn't such a big leap, is it?"

"The rules as regarding life-and-death sorts of circumstances have always struck me as pretty inflexible. Watch your step." Steve slides right instead of left, and a chunk of cement ceiling smashes harmlessly to the floor behind him. Some of the storage tank's cold still clings to Bucky. Carrying him is too much like carrying a corpse. "'Course, the rules have always tended to bend themselves around you. Shouldn't be surprised you've had the seasoning to bend 'em a little farther now."

A loose cable sparks and jumps, like an angry cobra. Steve kicks it away. "You said the exit's locked down?"

"If you're worried about Hydra circling in back behind us down here--"

"I'm not." He watches shuttered eyes, waiting for them to snap open, ice-blue and hate-cold. "We're going to have to figure out some kind of-- _humane_ accommodations. We've got a long trip ahead." And no quinjet to speed it up.

"And somewhere shy of two hundred pounds of ugly-ass baggage in need of a shave to drag along with you." Dugan chuckles and falls back toward the staircase. He leads the way up, clearing debris out of Steve's path. "Where _are_ you off to next, Cap?"

"Wakanda."

"Wa-- _what_ now?" Dugan snorts. His geographical expertise terminates somewhere between Boston and Brookline. "Never heard of it."

"You will." Steve ducks once more to clear last step up out of the Hydra-facility-that's-not-a-Hydra-facility. Sunlight spills in through cracks in the cement block above, warming the dull grays of the walls to pale pink. By daylight, and slack with sleep, Bucky's face looks almost familiar again.

Everything, and everyone, is what someone else makes of them, in the end.

 


	5. Chapter 5

"When you described the wonders of Wakanda," Peggy says, "I have to say this isn't precisely what I imagined."

She stands with her back against the wall, watchful. The Wakandan guards took away her sidearm, but her hand rests on the empty holster. The antechamber where they wait is badly ventilated; a single ceiling fan jerks at the end of its chain and slices up the dim fluorescent light in darker and lighter shades of gray. On the side of Peggy's chin, a purple bruise fades to yellow, barely visible in the gloom.

The man who gave it to her sits on the floor at her feet, jerking at the chain that links his hand to his ankles. Relentless as a junkyard dog. His eyes rove constantly, restlessly searching for the means and moment to escape. Or to attack.

Steve hadn't been able to stand the thought of leaving him in Hydra's hands a moment longer than necessary. Now he wonders if he acted too early. Too soon, too late. What's the point in bringing the future's playbook to the past if you're forever rewriting the rules of the games as you go? Steve played this reunion out in his head a thousand times over beforehand, and it never looked quite like this.

How many more times has he rehearsed his way through this _next_ meeting--as if he can brute-force his way back into the gravity of a predictable future? "Just wait, Peg," he says, with more confidence than he feels. The set of her mouth shifts up at one side, ever so slightly. "Just you wait."

"Captain Rogers." King Azzuri stands in the doorway, limned by light. His Wakandan accent is overlaid with the crisp consonants of his Oxford education. He has very little of his future grandson about him: his jaw more square, his mouth flatter, several inches shorter in stature.

The young boy behind him, though, no more than six or seven years old? This is practically T'Challa in miniature, so much so that Steve staggers under the weight of all that misplaced time. Not for the first time and not for the last. "Your majesty," he manages to say, and bends his neck. "Thank you for meeting us."

Azzuri strides into the room, followed by Prince T'Chaka and a pair of guards: two women, both apparently unarmed. _Apparently_ will be the operative word there, Steve suspects. A battered folding chair sits in the middle of the floor and when Azzuri sits upon it, it becomes a throne. The prince stands at his shoulder and the guards flank them both, staring sightlessly through Steve and Peggy and their human cargo. Only Azzuri flicks an eye at Bucky. "To what do we owe this curious honor?"

"King Azzuri, we need your help."

"Our _help_." The king shifts his weight, and the old chair creaks beneath him. "To incarcerate the man you have brought before me? It is in many ways regrettable to see your SHIELD crumble. But in other ways … well. If you are here, then you have seen a glimpse of a Wakanda not often permitted to outsiders--I would be deeply curious to hear, one day, how that came to be." He leans forward sharply. "But if you know us, Captain, you must also know that we will _not_ be the world's policeman. The United States of America has already performed that experiment, and failed. We will not be so quick to follow in your country's wake."

"I don’t want you to lock him up." Steve steps forward. The two women flanking the king don't move in response, but there is a sudden electricity in their posture, an implicit warning. "I want you to _help_ him."

Bucky yanks again at his chains. The young prince inhales sharply but doesn't jump back. "Baba?" he says.

"Mm." Azzuri steeples his hands before him, his brows heavy, his jaw set. He hasn't said no yet. Steve clings to that. "And is there a reason why I should help you with such a thing? When a white man shadows my doorstep with his hand out for unearned favors, must I let him in? Your countries have supped a long time now on the riches of this land while its inhabitants watch and hunger. While its dead bodies bear the weight of your banquet-table."

Harsh words. Hearing them puts Steve instantly, instinctively on the defensive--which means they're probably fair words too. There will be time later to sit down with all of that. "I'm not coming to you entirely empty-handed. But you should know first that I have another ask, too. A much bigger one."

Azzuri's mouth twists bitterly, a smile only by the loosest definition. "If you want a new home base for SHIELD or something like it, you will not find that within the borders of Wakanda."

"No. That's not it." A small, pained noise escapes Peggy. Steve _does_ want that, and her even more so. But that's not why they're here. "In the future that I come from, the Earth has faced threats from all over the universe. Threats that have sometimes been too big for us to handle on our own."

The guards glance at each other sidelong. Azzuri laughs helplessly. "Are you asking me for a _spaceship_ , Captain Rogers?"

"No--not that either." Not yet, anyway. "I'm coming at this all wrong. What I'm trying to say is, even with all the nightmares that outer space can throw at us, we're probably the ones who are going to destroy ourselves." He hesitates, glances at Peggy. She nodes minutely. "Your majesty, I'm sure you're more than familiar with the idea of clean energy."

"Alexandre Becquerel first observed the photovoltaic effect more than one hundred years ago. Russell Ohl developed the first solar cell more than ten years ago. The first solar cell in the western world, at least." Azzuri's smile this time is genuine, but it fades as he leans back in his chair. "It seems that what you're asking me for, Captain, is the world. And the world is a great deal to ask."

"Not for the people who live in it." Steve can't help but look at Prince T'Chaka, and Azzuri's gaze follows. "But I might have a way to make the price a little less painful."

He bends to reach for the backpack at his feet. "If I may--" The guards tense, but a brusque Wakandan syllable from their king holds them in their places. Then a soft sapphire light suffuses the room, and no one needs any outside impetus at all to silently watch and wonder.

The tesseract is more impressive-looking, Steve thinks, proffered in its secretive silver briefcase. That, however, would have been too hard for Howard to smuggle out of SHIELD as the organization slowly collapsed. Alone on Steve's palm, the cube seems translucent, almost fragile, even as it pulses with power. "The concentrated power of space, if you can harness it in time."

There's a moment, brief but pregnant with possibility, before Azzuri blinks and looks away from the tesseract. In that time, Steve can see the faint shape of a new future, growing up and branching out from this room. "In time," Azzuri repeats, shaping the words with curiosity.

"Use it," says Steve. He sets the stone in the king's waiting hands. "Then figure out, as soon as you can, how to destroy it."


	6. Chapter 6

The July, 1958 cover of Time features Captain America. For the second time, he's embarrassed to learn; the first having been a splashy red-white-and-blue posthumous painting. This time it's a photograph of him kneeling opposite the mountainous bulk of an unconscious polar bear. _INSIDE: CAPTAIN CLIMATE?_ the headline reads. A draft of humid, salt-tinged air stirs the batik curtains over the open window, carrying with it the voices of two bickering dockworkers. The breeze ruffles the pages of the magazine, inviting Steve to open it. Instead he tosses it aside. It slides to the far end of the table, where his breakfast of putu mayam lies in a huddle at the edge of his plate--noodles cold, sugar congealed into a sticky paste.

"Astonishing to think they're all gone already, by your time."

Peggy's ability to sneak up on him even in heels never fails to astonish. The sleeves of her olive-green salwar kameez are rolled to the elbows and her hair is pinned up tight, ready for work. What little makeup she wears has washed away under a fine sheen of sweat. The look is both a far cry from her days in the Special Operations Executive, and comfortingly familiar as well. Madripoor suits her. It suits him too, as a home base. Right now the USA wants nothing to do with the dregs of SHIELD that steadfastly refuse to circle the drain, Wakanda can hardly be entangled with an ex-American quasi-military organization while it makes its delicate debut on the world stage, and Steve's beyond wary of throwing in with some other country's government even if they'd have him.

Madripoor, luckily, has no functioning government whatsoever beyond the tense and ever-shifting agreements of the pirate captains who call it home. The street food's damn good too, although Steve would have paid a lot of money these days to be able to stroll up to a pushcart and walk away with a knish and a good dill pickle.

Peggy slides into the seat opposite him and puts her feet on his chair. She lifts one of the noodles from his plate and drops it into her mouth, sticky sugar-paste and all. "The Arctic, wiped clean of life in a bare seventy years. Almost inconceivably quickly."

He sits up straighter. On the surface her words are straightforward enough, but their cadence converts them into a challenge. "A little exaggeration goes a long way sometimes. I hope you believe me when I say it's getting _bad_ , Peg."

"I do believe you. It's just … harder than I remember, sometimes, to know when _not_ to." She's smiling, but her lips are too tight. She winds a second noodle around one finger. "I don't like to imagine where you've been, what you've seen, that's warranted you becoming so damnably good at lying."

He nudges the plate toward her. "I picked the bears because no one cares when you talk about dead _people_."

She freeze, hand halfway over the plate. "Steve …"

"Thousands dead in droughts every year. Five hundred swept out to sea in one hurricane. _One_. More every day in wildfires, floods, heat waves. You'd think seeing something like that would make people want to turn the car around. Back away from the cliff. And some, sure. But there's a whole lot more hands trying to stay the course."

She slides off the chair and stands over him and grips his shirt-front, gives it a solid shake. "I believe I've caught you in another lie," she says softly. "Or did you mean to suggest that, when you say _no one cares_ , that I wouldn't either?"

"Not a lie. A mistake. How is it I'm getting sloppy when I've got you here to keep me on my toes?" She lets go and folds her arms. There's a sticky smudge on his shirt where he touches it. He lets go of the attempt at banter. "I'm sorry. I'm just always thinking anymore--I've made so much different here already. What am I going to do when I butt my head up against something I _can't_ change?"

"Give yourself a concussion, I expect." Her nod is deliberate, her smile fragile. "This isn't just about the future, Steve. Is it?"

"They're putting him back on ice." It's his turn to stand now. He crosses to the window, draws back the curtain. The sun melts golden on the horizon and black ships cut lines of wake through the sparkling water. "The tech's not there yet. It'll take time …"

"Time is a gift, and one we've been generously granted." She leans on the table, which slides slightly on the tiles with a screech of protest. "You always insist on walking about with the weight of the world on your shoulders. And while they are very _broad_ shoulders and have done with a great deal of world upon them for a long time already … there are a great many other shoulders available to share the load." She thumps the tabletop with one palm. "You had a team in the future. You have one now as well, even if we aren't geniuses or gods or--or nuclear space-women."

That spectacularly clunky phrase hangs in the air for a moment, then sends them both crashing down into laughter. He lets the curtain fall closed. "You're more than enough nuclear space-woman for me."

"I should say so." Her smile fades as she produces a yellow computer printout from the deep pocket of her shalwars. It's faintly rumpled, from the humidity and the heat of her body. "Because we've got work to do, Captain Rogers. And finish your breakfast first--it'll keep and I shouldn't like to spend a transoceanic trip in the company of a man with an accelerated metabolism and an empty stomach."

He straightens, eyes going to his shield where it rests against the opposite wall. "Where to this time?" From their Madripoor base, connected by a network of ex-SHIELD agents, Wakandan War Dogs, and Howling Commandos, they have crisscrossed the globe. No destination would be too far or too strange, and very little would surprise him now.

Very little. But not nothing.


	7. Chapter 7

There had always been the possibility that HYDRA would figure out how to make more supersoldiers. Steve knew that the first time he ventured into battle in this timestream: that he could be captured, his blood drawn, its contents analyzed and understood. At the time he'd deemed it worth the risk. Now, as he stares down a squad of a half-dozen supersoldiers, he has to wonder if that was the right call.

He also wonders why he never figured on looking into his own face at the head of that super-soldier squad. _Let sleeping dogs lie_ , sure, but the rules are less clear when it's your own self left to slumber.

The wire in his ear is quiet. The clench in his jaw has never yet managed to squeeze words out of the thing, but that's never yet stopped him from trying.

"Mr. Rogers." It's been a long time since someone addressed Steve as anything other than _Captain_. The younger version of himself smiles, holds up his hands. He looks at ease in a well-cut suit in a way that Steve has never quite managed. The six others behind him are all dressed similarly, unobtrusive dark colors and three-button suitcoats. A casual eye wouldn't mark them as something more than ordinary men, just a larger-than-usual professional security detail, in this average-looking Brooklyn office building. But their shoulders strain against the boxy polyester in a way not commonly seen in the era before pro sports athletes and PEDs, and Steve has found some decidedly non-standard computer equipment in the basement.

With one hand, Steve minutely adjusts the placement of the pack on his back: making sure they see it without being too obvious. The top of a two-foot tall hard drive peeps out of the top; the weight of its forty-odd discs bites into his shoulders. He has _got_ to ask the Wakandans to invent something like a flash drive soon.

In the meantime, he has to keep his other self talking. Keep his eyes here, on this uncanny reflection of himself.

Wait for the all-clear. Then get out. There's no win for him here except to buy enough time for Peggy and the Commandos. And, perhaps, a clean escape.

"I'm sure no one here wants any trouble," the younger Steve says. "Least of all a man wanted by the US government for extrajudicial activities." His smile sharpens. There's a hardness in his eyes that makes him difficult to look at. His face is Steve's own in a funhouse mirror when all the lights are out.

Or maybe Steve is the warped version. _This_ is the version of him who belongs to this universe.

"Funny you should mention extrajudicial activities." Steve tightens his grip on the shield--black painted now, less obtrusive. The other Steve is unarmed. Did HYDRA pull the shield out of the ice with him, or leave it buried there? Maybe it's long since been scrapped for spare vibranium. "I don't think there's a lot of legality attached to the political campaign of a brainwashed foreign agent."

"Foreign agent!" That wrings a laugh out of the other Steve. "Resorting to smears. Is that the best you can manage these days? I'm Captain America. And that means the _real_ America. Not the weak-chinned eco-warrior pablum that you're trying to shove down our throats."

He probably really believes that. Probably believes himself every inch the hero of this story, and why shouldn't he, when he's been imprinted with that fact from the moment the ice cracked over his head? "I'm not shoving anything down your throat," Steve says. "Afraid I might lose a finger." Ten years has given HYDRA ample time to finetune their psychological programming algorithms. On his trip across the Pacific, Steve watched the ad starring this version of himself that launched a putative political career--its subtly vicious attacks on his Democratic opponent and the Republican incumbent Vice President alike. He's slick, he's handsome, and he's doing a damn good job of selling the country on the worst version of themselves. The version that will not only serve HYDRA's goals, but move them out into the mainstream. Governance by the military, a little old-fashioned eugenics thrown in for good measure, dressed up for public consumption in a good Italian necktie and a firm handshake. Steve's nightmares come in the shape of poll numbers now.

The wire is silent.

Maybe it won't come to a fight. The younger Steve holds up a hand--holds it out, like he's expecting a handshake. "Hand over the hardware, Mr. Rogers," he says, and damn, but that _Mister_ stings. "The shield, too, just to make sure there's no trouble." When Steve doesn't comply, he shakes his head. "Come on. Skulking around on sovereign American soil? Undermining democracy? It's embarrassing for both of us. You're better than this. Or at least you used to be." The extended hand falls back to his side. "I'll put in a good word with my friends in the FBI for you. General Phillips' kid made agent there a couple years back."

"I'd just as soon take my chances without your good word, thanks." Why did he leave himself on the ice so long? What was he waiting for? He'd jumped at the chance to fix the mistakes of his past before checking to make sure he wouldn't crush the pillars that held up his world when he landed.

And he's still waiting now--waiting for them to make the first move. He's fought himself once before and didn't exactly relish the experience. And that was one-on-one, not to mention well before he was pushing forty-five. No world-shaking secrets in his back pocket to drop at the right moment, either.

"You know we can't just let you walk away. Breaking and entering, theft--I'm guessing there's some election laws being violated here too." His weight shifts subtly forward. Must be about time to get this party started. "This is still a nation of laws."

"Steve--" A warm familiar voice in his ear. "We have the asset. Let's go."

He's already moving when she says _go_.

These guys aren't going to let him slip the leash easily. First step: separate them. Break one overwhelmingly superior threat into smaller pieces.

Steve leaps shield-first into-- _through_ \--the glass that separates a cubicle from the office floor. Heavy feet crunch on the glass but he's already up on the desk and crashing through a fresh-forged hole in the drop ceiling. He hauls the pack up behind him. Not much room to maneuver in here, just enough to roll over his side and drive his boots through the Styrofoam ceiling on the other side of the wall.

Bullets punch through to his left, breaking the next set of glass and converting a desktop telephone to so much shrapnel. Someone else is in the ceiling now, and undoubtedly more coming the long way around. Steve catches the ceiling-crawler as he comes through, a direct blow to the head with the flat of his shield. The guy goes down hard. So much for higher ground advantage, Steve thinks, and peels out of the cubicle.

Another goon catches him before he reaches the northwest stairwell and this one's got a clear shot. Bullets ping against his shield. He's still got the hard drive weighing him down. Why? He unslings it and throws it at the man in one smooth motion. The man fumbles for it--computer drives are all but sacred in this day and age, _your salary wouldn't pay for half that thing, fella_ \--and in that moment Steve's on him, driving shield into wrist, gun into floor. The gun goes skittering, but the man tackles Steve with the shield between them and they both roll head over heels into a desk.

From the ground they trade blows back and forth. It occurs to Steve that jujitsu probably isn't _a thing_ yet--he gives up on strength-against-strength and when the guy comes down on top of him, he wraps his legs around his waist and shoves him backward, gets his leg around the guy's neck, and flips him over. Five heartbeats later and he's choked the other man out.

He picks up the shield. He keeps moving.

There's pounding footsteps from the corner where the northeast stairwell would be, more coming up the stairs. Steve looks around, finds his nearest exit. Where is he, the third floor? Sure, no problem. He takes a running start and slams through a window into a dead hang mid-air for what feels like forever. Then there's the ground, scraping and rolling against his sides and shoulders like he's the one holding still and the whole weight of the world is bouncing off him.

He intends to roll to his feet and keep moving. Peggy and the rest of the crew will have the asset locked down in the arranged safe meet-up point. (When did he start calling him _the asset_ even in the safety of his own head?) But unexpected impact stops him first and drives him hard onto his back against cement and broken glass. Ribs creak, perhaps crack.

He grabs the weight that's lodged against his side and finds it foot-shaped. When his vision clears, he's looking up into his own face. "Guess we're doing this after all," he says, and thrusts that leg upward.

The other Steve steps back but doesn't flip or fall. He kicks the shield where it's fallen, though, and sends it sliding across the street. Out of Steve's reach. But that's enough of a gap to let Steve regain his feet. Bones in his side grind when he lunges at his other self, slashing a kick at his side. He hits home and the other Steve staggers, takes the hit, slams Steve straight in the injured side before he can tuck back into a defensive posture.

After that there's no thinking, only the blur of arms and legs and bloodied fists. And pain--given and received.

On some dim instinctive level, Steve is aware that he is a better fighter than this split-off version. That a man can learn a lot in ten stolen years of refusing to give up.

He's also aware that at some point, no amount of skill is enough. Not when you match a man who hurts because he has to up against a man who hurts because he _can_.

A split cheek. A cracked molar. More broken ribs. A torn rhomboid that gives way with a scream. Some injuries are his, some are the other's, and they all hurt in the way that only our worst mistakes can. "When are you going to learn," the other Steve pants, "that you can't keep doing this forever?"

His mouth curves in a blood-smeared smile. It's the shift of his eyes, though, that give Steve a sliver of warning.

He turns soon enough to see the security man in the doorway. He turns soon enough to hear the gun's report.

He doesn't know which happens first and he falls down fast and hard into a place too cold to care.


	8. Chapter 8

Steve wakes reluctantly.

Even in sleep there's no place to hide from the pain. But there's refuge of a different kind. From failure. From finding out how deep the damage runs--not to him. He's healed from worse. But there's no knowing how vast the wounds he's left across this timeline run.

Unfamiliar scents coax him up from the warm restless dark. Madripoor? No, there's the caramelized warmth of sweet potato, and undercurrents of cinnamon. Wakanda? A growing awareness of place, of self, asserts itself. "The asset," he says, before he opens his eyes.

" _The asset_ indeed. I have a name, you know. You used to know it."

Steve's eyes slit open. "Howard?"

"You got another asset you're seeing behind my back?" Howard looks less like Tony with each passing year. His face has thinned out, his forehead gone higher. There's something of the Stark from Steve's future, though, in the line of unshaven stubble along Howard's jaw. "I'm offended, Steve, I tell you what."

"Peggy."

"Getting some sleep. W'Matu is running to get her now. It's been shift-on shift-off around here with you, y'know." One side of Howard's mustache lifts in a crooked smile. "It's good to see you again. Circumstances notwithstanding. At least I'm not playing political footsie with your Nazi wannabe alter ego anymore! Hey, don't touch that." He pulls Steve's hand away from the golden, pulsating arc that encircles the bed where he lies. Briefly, a schematic of a simplified human body lights up on its surface, shot through with red and amber warnings--it winks out when Steve's hand drops back by his side.

"Hey," Howard goes on, like it hasn't been years since they've been in the same room. "How come you haven't invited me out to Wakanda before? The folks here make me feel like a know-nothing fourth-grader. Do you know one of them literally _slapped my hand_ when I tried to get a closer look at an absolutely next-generation power source? It's _amazing_."

Steve tries to push to a sit, doesn't quite succeed, except in sending Howard into something just shy of a nervous fit. "If you're _here_ … "

Howard clears his throat. "Well, there's something of a kerfuffle back home, a few unpleasant words like _felony_ and _indictment_ are being bandied about in a truly unpleasant fashion. Here seemed like a better place for now. On account of the secret global superpower situation. And the lack of extradition treaty doesn't hurt either, of course." His face shifts into a genuine smile. "Your people pulled Maria, too, so don't worry about that--she's looking forward to meeting you, you know. Once she gets over the whole 'international fugitive' deal."

A numb dread swallows Steve whole, and how can a body be so numb and still _hurt_ so damn much? "So you didn't get proof. Didn't get into their systems."

"Oh, no--I mean yes. I did." Howard produces a pen from his jacket pocket and immediately develops an intense interest in it. "Rerouted a connection through the remote drive device the Commandos were carrying, dumped everything in there to the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the office of the AG, CBS, NBC, I'm talking an absolute flood of alphabet soup here."

Howard's talking fast and Steve's swimming through quicksand trying to keep up. "The data was corrupted? The agencies have already been infiltrated by HYDRA?"

"The data was good and as far as I know it was regular guys who got it. Douglas Edwards had it on CBS Evening News and everything." Howard slumps back, rocking his chair hard against the wall. "It just … didn't matter."

Steve's chest clenches. "It matters a _lot_."

"Your words to God's ears, my friend! But it turns out the old US of A is not incredibly well equipped to handle a literal, actual foreign agent smiling at them from behind the podium of a presidential debate." He raises a hand  and ticks off on his fingers. "About a third of people are squawking their heads off over this, and rightly so, may I add. Another third thinks it's all just a pack of dirty commie lies, move along, nothing to see here. And the last set doesn't really care if they're voting for Captain Hydra as long as he keeps saying the stuff they like." He sighs and slouches forward, head meeting hands halfway in the middle. "Hell, for some of them, the Hydra thing's practically a bonus."

Steve's head weighs a million pounds. He wills sleep to come back and collect him again; sleep silently demurs.

"I think that will be quite enough for now, Howard, thank you." Peggy stands in the doorway, one hand braced on either side. Her dressing gown is untied over rumpled pajamas and her hair hangs loose. "I'm not such a fool as to think my husband's bedside won't shortly become our new strategic planning center. But perhaps not straight away?"

"Sorry, Peg." Howard stands with a grunt that extends into a groan as he stretches. "Got carried away."

She murmurs something appreciative as he shuffles out the door--he mutters an apology to someone in the hallway that he stumbles into unseeingly. Then she slides carefully into bed alongside Steve. Her shoulder intersects the glowing arc, which emits a remonstrative beep. "Another couple of scars for your collection," she says lightly, and her fingers curl between his.

"Noticed you had a limp there too, Agent." He wants to take her in his arms, to understand the shape of her wounds with his hands. He settles for her cool breath on the side of his face. "Hope you didn't do anything stupid on my behalf."

"And risk snagging my stockings? Never. Honestly, one would think you'll never learn."

They lie together in familiar silence for a while. Counting heartbeats together and trying not to number them all at the same time. It's not right to try to guess how many they both have left, when every single one has been borrowed in the first place.

If Steve doesn't keep count, it's easier to lose track of the fact that he's not aging as fast as Peggy.

"I can't do this forever," he says. He hasn't had asthma since before the serum but that admission squeezes his chest in the same old way, closes his windpipe. "I'm not immortal. And what's my legacy going to be?"

"Steve--" Her wet fingers on his face are how he realizes he's crying.

"I thought I could save my friends. I thought I could save myself from the old mistakes." His throat jerks, but he grinds the words out. "What if the new ones are worse?"

Peggy slides one arm carefully across his chest, nocks her head between his shoulder and ear. "What if they're not?" she asks, then raises her voice to the door. "Come in!"

A heavy shadow falls across the bed. "Steve," Bucky says, too firmly, like he's reassuring _himself_. His prosthetic arm is skeletal, metal bones and nerves unplated and exposed tenderly to the eye. Clean-shaven, short-haired--he never had a chance to let it grow out, this time, in between trips back under the ice. His smile is hesitant, but not haunted. He looks like a man who could learn to smile better, given time. Given opportunity.

"You'll make mistakes," Peggy says, lips against Steve's ear. "But are you really willing to give up _trying_ to make them better ones, this time around?"

END OF PART 1


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